how to work around APT's “Release file expired” problem on a local mirror

Question

I have a local mirror (created with debmirror), and when I try to do a cache update (apt-get update) after a few days, I get this:

E: Release file expired, ignoring file:/home/wena/.repo_bin/dists/sid/Release (invalid since 14h 31min 45s)                                                  

How do I work around that?

Answer 1

The release files have a valid-until entry, e.g. Valid-Until: Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:17:56 UTC

If the release file isn't valid anymore, you should run debmirror again to check if there are any changes in the repository. One change will be the release file and you will get a new validity for it.

You could easily automate this with a crontab entry.

Answer 2

Some of the mirrors out there might have stale files. This happened to me recently, and it was in also tied to the caching server I'm using (apt-cacher-ng) which tries to save bandwidth by redirecting the repositories for same archive to a single entity (in my case if was a Hungarian mirror). Direct updates through German mirror worked ok, for example. Try changing the mirror you're using. In case you're using apt-cacher-ng, you'll need to do something in the line of changing the following file's contents:

/etc/apt-cacher-ng/backends_debian /etc/apt-cacher-ng/backends_debvol

After that you should also restart apt-cacher-ng for changes to take effect.

Answer 3

Use :

aptitude -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false update  
apt-get -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false update

Answer 4

This works:

apt-get -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false update